This Is Why You Suck At Guitar: Your Picking Patterns Suck, With Ben Eller

Ladies! Gentlemen! Cyborgs of indeterminate sex! It’s time for a brand new installment of “This is Why You Suck at Guitar.”

It’s been far too long since Uncle Ben here dropped a TiWYSaG lesson on you guys, but what can i say? Touring and recording with Whitechapel, Unearth, Far Far Away, and Andy Wood sure does take up a lot of my time. Plus I’ve been battling a major wolverine infestation in my crawlspace, so there’s that.

This time, you’re going to learn the logic behind picking patterns used in chord arpeggiation. That sounds really expensive, but it’s actually a dollar store technique you’ve heard in songs like “More Than a Feeling” by Boston, “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day, and many more.

The great thing is, once you learn the logic behind when to use an upstroke as opposed to a downstroke, you won’t have to go through the agony of memorizing a long picking pattern anymore. You’ve got enough to worry about, what with learning the chords, the order in which to hit the strings (and of course the wolverines in the crawlspace), you don’t need to be trying to memorize “down, down, up, up, up, down, up, down” on top of it!

This mostly applies to chord arpeggios like the ones I mentioned earlier. In some styles of music, such as the bluegrass and folk sounds of my beloved Appalachia, strict alternate picking is used in chord arpeggiation as a way of maintaining time feel. But this technique will work for pretty much anything else.

Thanks for watching, kids, please like the video and subscribe to my channel for more great lessons and sick licks. Cheers!